Sir – When your correspondent Ag MacKeith takes me to task, I am afraid it is from reading the alarmist propaganda rather than the science on climate change.

If so, no wonder Ag is worried, and feels unreliable renewable electricity at three times the proper price is a better bet than frying to death. However, science itself attributes at most some of the apparent global warming to fossil fuel use, does not forecast any imminent apocalypse, and recognises that even if we scrapped fossil fuel altogether it would only slow not halt the forecast rate of climate change.

While there is uncertainty about how fast global warming is occurring, or the extent to which it is caused by fossil fuels, there is no uncertainty at all about the horrendous cost and ineffectiveness of renewable energy, and no excuse either for our politicians having forced us — and future generations — to pay exorbitantly through our electricity bills for their posturing on climate change.

Luckily there are alternatives, as the Government is belatedly beginning to see. With CO2 free nuclear providing the base load, and cheap and plentiful fracked gas providing the swing output for peaks and troughs in demand, we can have it both ways. Reliable and cost-effective energy, with a huge fall in CO2 emissions, instead of wildly expensive and unreliable renewables. In case the alarmists have succeeded in worrying Ag about fracking too, all those tales of our suffering from earthquakes and contaminated water supplies have little if any foundation.

As for CO2 emissions, the only major economy which has reduced them, without exporting its heavy industry and the jobs it provided, is the USA, which did not sign up for Kyoto, or engage in empty gestures like Climate Change Acts it had no idea how to implement, but went fracking instead.

Michael Tyce, Waterstock